The Beachhead

by Christopher Mari

  She didn’t leave the raised platform as the students raced past. The boy claiming to be Alex Raymond didn’t move forward, nor did she, until after the three of them had been left alone in the yard.

  “Hey you.”

  “Hi there, Kendra.”

  She clapped chalk dust from her hands as she descended the platform’s three steps. “I’d like to say I’m surprised to see you, Alex. Grace, all those years ago—she wasn’t my imagination, then?”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “I’m—” Her voice quavered right there. In dreams and in very still waking moments, J. J. would remember that catch sounding down through the years that followed. “I’m so happy you’re among them.”

  “You sound as if you had doubts about me.”

  “Fewer than about my own chances.”

  “You’ve always thought too little of yourself.”

  She began to open her mouth, said nothing, then looked at him sidelong. “Have you come to judge me, Alex?”

  “No. Not to judge.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “I’m supposed to give you a message.” He glanced around. “Is there someplace we can talk privately? Maybe have something to eat?”

  “Mom.” J. J. grabbed her arm. “You’re not gonna go off with this—whoever he is.”

  Kendra took her son’s hand and kissed it. “I’ve dealt with a lot worse.”

  J. J. wandered the streets for hours, not wanting to talk to anyone or stay anywhere for too long. After a time he found himself on the beach and sat there looking out at the waves, then up and down the long, curving shoreline. What had it been like that first day? Had he been there, what would he have believed? He stayed on the beach long after it got too dark and too cold to be there, thinking.

  Toward dawn he gave up. Tired and hungry, he wandered back to his house. He didn’t want to see Alex Raymond’s face again. In fact, he felt like punching it. He found his mother alone, sitting at their table, sipping coffee from a clay mug he had made as a little boy. The fire in the hearth was low. She was wearing his father’s leather jacket from the old Defense Forces.

  It was hard to describe the look on her face at that moment. Words came to his mind, but none was a perfect fit. Relief. Satisfaction. Expectation. Her face seemed complete in a way that no human face had ever looked. Every human expression had something waiting in it. The human race had always been waiting for something: a response, a piece of knowledge, a shred of hope. Kendra’s face was absent these things.

  “Is he gone?” J. J. asked as he took a chair at the kitchen table. She squeezed his forearm as he sat at her elbow.

  “Alex? Yes. He’s gone.”

  J. J. glanced around. “Did he, um, disappear?”

  “No.” She laughed one of her good, true laughs, deep and throaty. “Front door. About ten minutes before you came. Oh, he was very real. Had dinner, two cups of coffee, and quite a few tea cakes.” She indicated the place setting before him with her chin. “That’s his plate.”

  “How was your, uh, visit?”

  “Good.” She nodded, not looking at her son. “I got to say some things I had been wanting to tell him for a really long time.”

  “Mom, you don’t think he’s really—”

  “J. J.”

  Her son shook his head and sighed. “Will he be back?”

  “Here? I’m not sure. He’s got a lot of people left to see. But yes, he’s coming back.”

  She paused. Dust motes drifted along the slanting morning sunlight coming through the east-facing windows. J. J. watched them for a while in silence. Where do they come from, and where do they go to when the light fades?

  “They’re all coming back.”

  “What’re you talking about, Mom?”

  “Alex isn’t the only one who came back.”

  “Who, Mom? Who’s coming back?”

  Her eyes were pooling with tears. Her son had never seen her cry before. “Everyone who ever lived or died loving someone more than himself.”

  “Everyone? I don’t understand.”

  “Alex is just the beginning. Grace Davison, Jack Lewis, my parents, my grandparents—everyone. Even”—she reached out to squeeze her son’s hand—“even someone—a child—I’ve never met in person but always wanted to, even when I was afraid to.” She shook her head. “God in heaven, I don’t know how that’s possible.”

  “Because it’s not possible, Mom.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said through her teeth.

  They sat in silence for a few moments, one foot and one generation apart. “And Dad?” He squeezed the hand she had given him between both of his. “Is Dad coming too?”

  “That’s what Alex came to tell me. I’m waiting for him now.”

  “Mom, look at me. Look at me. How can it be him? It can’t be. You of all people know that. It’s a copy, a fake.”

  “I don’t believe that.” The tears that had been pooling in her eyes were now streaming freely down her cheeks. “If it’s him in all the ways that matter, how can that be a lie? If he comes back to me . . . the how doesn’t matter at all.”

  J. J. trembled for the first time in his life. He looked at the front door, expecting a knock. His knees shook, and he felt light-headed. His mother stroked his face and smoothed his hair from his forehead the way she had when he was a little boy. He kissed her cheek and then cried in her arms like a baby and without shame. Then he wiped his face with the heel of his palm and stood up.

  “I’m going to go out now, Mom. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Why, J. J.? You just got home.”

  “You need to see him first. I’ll see—I’ll see him soon enough.”

  She moved to argue, then stopped. “And always,” she said after a moment. “From now on.”

  J. J. began to wander the city streets. At such an early hour, it was odd to find them filling up with people. Step after step, block after block, people he knew well—and some he didn’t—kept coming up to him to tell him of a long-dead brother they had just seen, a father or mother buried decades past, a son who disappeared in the early days after the Arrival, a famous face from a book in the Archives. One man claimed to have seen Abraham Lincoln; a woman, Mahatma Gandhi.

  He wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood in a befuddled daze, sometimes being introduced to someone’s long-dead loved one, other times being hugged or kissed by someone for no reason at all. Pawed and clawed by this confused mass of humanity, he felt stifled and alone. In desperation he sought out his grandmother but got to the corner of her block only to learn from a neighbor that she had gone out as soon as the first news broke. Where had she gone now? To preach? To witness? To find her Christian? Perhaps even her husband? He spent the next two hours looking for her white mane on frenzied streets in vain.

  So J. J. walked alone and tried to take it all in. Without wanting to, without believing it was even possible, he did so hoping to see his own father. Others may have wanted to see another kind of father. Yet that day J. J. wanted to see not God, but John Giordano, the man he had only ever glimpsed in charcoal sketches made by family friends and in hearthside stories told by his mother and grandmother. He wanted to hug him and memorize the waves in his blond hair and kiss his cheek. He wanted to brighten the way his mother had when she saw that boy and believed he was Alex Raymond. He wanted to have the kind of faith in reunion she possessed be rewarded with the knowledge of fact. He looked and looked and found no one but the smiling faces of those who had already seen and believed. How could they know for sure? And who was he to say his father would be among the pieces of this game that he was unequipped to comprehend?

  For hours he walked among the living and the returned, the known and the unknown, the most famous people in human history and the most personal intimates of their lives since the Arrival. And as he walked a hush began falling over the old city and the winding countryside interwoven with those earthen dwellings that were as much a part of nature as they were
an extension of it. And everywhere he went all the faces were looking up; all the faces were aglow as they bore witness to the clear and coming end of the human race as they knew it and the beginning of the next step in human evolution.

  What were they all marveling at? Above them a massive white object topped with bright spires and resting on a shallow, silvery bowl was tearing through the upper atmosphere—a city alight and descending from the sky. J. J. thought it beautiful. And believed.

  Wherever it had come from, whatever it would be, they were growing certain of one thing: for the first time ever, they just might be ready to meet it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Books might be written in isolation, but they’re never published without considerable help. This novel would never have made it out of my drawer without the following people.

  First and foremost my undefeatable agent, Jennifer Lyons, who believed in this novel from the very beginning and never gave up—never, ever—and Jason Kirk, my terrific editor at 47North, who worked like anything to make sure it was published and took on Ocean of Storms as a bonus. A special thank-you also has to go out to Caitlin Alexander for her generous editorial suggestions.

  My late father, Anthony Mari, taught me by example what a man should and should not be. Without him, I would not be who I am.

  My in-laws, José, Rose Marie, and Joseph Estela, have always treated me as a member of the family. There’s really no way to ever thank them enough for that.

  The definition of friendship is having someone who sticks by you through the years no matter what and who always tells you the truth. These names have always defined friendship to me: Kevin Mari; Mike Mongillo; Andrew, Chris, Gary, Jess, and Judy Dieckman; Meg Mullin; and Dann Russo. And to Jeremy Brown, my buddy and coauthor of Ocean of Storms, all I can say is: I don’t deserve to be this happy.

  In the end, though, this book is owed to the women who have most influenced my life: my phenomenal wife, Ana Maria Estela, who has always given me the three things a writer needs—time, space, and honest opinions; my late grandmother, Frances Benevisto, who taught me the best way to learn how to tell stories was to listen to good ones; and finally, my mother, Regina Mari, who didn’t live to see this novel’s publication but who believed in her great heart that this book was “the one.”

  We did it, Ma.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2016 Ana Maria Estela

  Christopher Mari was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Fordham University. His writing has been published in America, Citizen Culture, Current Biography, and U.S. Catholic, among other magazines. His previous novel, Ocean of Storms, was written with Jeremy K. Brown.